Maggie

You can take the boys out of Danville, but the Page Bond Gallery's current exhibition suggests you can't take Danville out of the artists the boys become.

"Maggie" presents 27 silver-gelatin prints and one color print that illuminate the indomitable spirit of a Danville woman, Margaret Ennis Booher Cooper, who will turn 100 this year.

Aunt Maggie, as she's affectionately known, lives alone and cares for herself in the simple house she and her late husband, Willie, moved into when they got married in 1930.

As a farm girl who left school at age 16 and became a weaver in a cotton mill, Maggie never strayed far from home.

Her illuminators - the globally celebrated photographer Emmet Gowin and his up-and-coming photographer son, Elijah Gowin - traveled far to build their artistic careers, but never forgot their Danville roots.

Maggie is the aunt of Emmet's wife, Edith.

Emmet, an exemplar of eloquent photographic simplicity and honesty, spends most of his time at his Bucks County, Pa., home near Princeton University, where he's taught photography for 35 years. Elijah, who recently won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship partly on the basis of the images of outdoor baptisms he showed at Page Bond Gallery in 2006, lives near the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he teaches photography and digital imaging.

Their lives converge with Maggie's at Edith's grandmother's house, which Edith bought long ago as a place for her family to spend Christmases and summers. It's down the road from Maggie's house.

Emmet's 15 images were created between 1963 and 1978; Elijah's 13 images, between 1999 and 2003.

"We never set out to do pictures just of Maggie," Elijah, 41, explained at Page Bond before the opening reception. "These are all pieces of larger series of family photographs. It was my mom's idea to bring pictures of Maggie together."

The aim was not documentary, father and son agreed.

"If it were," Emmet, 67, said, "we'd have to have 100 pictures. This show is a crystallization of feelings about the woman."

Most of the photographs have the force of portraiture, but the effect is multidimensional and the vision each artist brings to Maggie is quite different.

Emmet's prints are small, devoid of darkroom manipulation and simply framed in strip molding. Elijah works in larger formats, tones his images and frames the matted results in thick frames made of blond wood.

Emmet's straightforward images offer subtle surprises that have the force of character revelation. Elijah's images are often theatrical. In each one, he has constructed a sculpture out of found objects to involve Maggie.

Maggie cottons especially to Elijah.

"She loves Elijah's attention," Emmet said. "She says, 'I'm Elijah's favorite model.'"

"She is my favorite model," Elijah confirmed. "She never takes a bad picture. She likes me to photograph her. I didn't choose her. She chose me. She was interested. When I was building sculptures out of old things to use in her photographs, she would tell me what the old things were."

Asked to cite a photograph he think works particularly well, he pointed to the illusionistic "Bird Woman," dated 1999, in which Maggie seems to be holding birds by strings that might otherwise fly away. "Those birds are paper images I enlarged from the Internet and traced onto tin, which we painted black, then stapled onto the back of the barn," he explained.

"This photograph is a good example of Maggie having faith in what I was doing, but also being an accomplice. We made 10 or so different negatives that day, but none of them worked very well.

"Then, finally, she said, 'What if I were standing here pulling at the birds like they were trying to get away?' That was perfect."

Emmet also depended on Maggie's approval in assessing the value of his favorite, a 1963 photo titled "Willie and Maggie Cooper at Reva's, Christmas," in which Maggie and Willie seem to toast the camera with their coffee mugs.

"She adores that picture," Emmet said. "She asked me to make a print for each of her grandchildren for Christmas. I asked her why. She looked at it and said, 'It does something to me. It brings everything back.'

"The more I look at it," Emmet continued, "the more that picture speaks for itself. To me, it seems true, beyond honest."

"I want to honor Maggie with this book of portraits," Edith wrote last year in her introduction to a book of her husband's and son's photographs of Maggie. "Her heart is generous and her mind still alert. Her life is a living guidepost, showing us how to live with grace and humility."

Roy Proctor, a freelance writer and theater director, retired in 2004 as the art and theater writer for The Times-Dispatch. He can be reached at .